Fun testing activites you can do with your teams!

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I wanted to share a fun testing activity that we’ve done at my company and I wanted to ask what fun testing activities have you done or been a part of before?

The reason I ask is within my company each quarter we gather all the Quality Engineers together for a day of talks from external speakers, networking, ice-breakers and team building tasks. I’m looking to gather a few ideas and I thought it might be useful for us all to share experiences too!

A couple of activites we’ve done before include:

A Testathon! - that’s right not a hackathon but a testathon.

We split the entire QA community into teams and gave each a particular website. The idea was that the teams would go away for 2 hours to understand their product, define what they were going to test, how they captured their results, prioritise their bugs and make recommendations. This was all then presented back at the end of the activity.

We received great feedback from this event all of my colleagues found it exciting and challenging.

A Coding challenge

We teamed up with an external company to put on some coding challenges. This involved once again splitting everyone into teams based on technical skills for example a team of 3 consisted of 1 advanced, 1 intermediate, 1 beginner. They were then presented with a particular problem and they had to code a solution in javascript. An example challenge was; is this number odd? The challenges got progressively harder and they earned points for each correct one they completed.

We had mix feedback for this one, the technical QAs loved it, but the not so technical QAs found it a steep learning curve and found they were just waiting for other team members to solve it before copy and pasting their solution! We will definitely re-think this activity if we were going to run something like this again by perhaps having purely beginner teams work on particular beginner problems.

I hope that the above activities give you some food for thought on how you could run them within your work place!

Which brings me back to my question… What fun testing activities have you ran or been involved in? What feedback did you receive and how would you improve it if you were to run it again?

Please reach out to me if you have any questions about the activities we’ve ran, I’d be happy to share :slight_smile:

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We might setup a Testathon also!

I also love doing mob testing / testing dojo’s / testing challenges. Find an application and ask permission to test it and split up in teams and find the most bugs.

Exploration Nights

We also have exploration nights, it’s a 2-4 hours evening session about a specific topic (for example: api testing tools, monitoring, mocking, …) the example I’ll use is API testing tools:

So we prep an application which everyone can test and we create a list of 10 api testing frameworks/tools. We each pick 1 framework we haven’t used yet before and explore the tool. After 30 minutes, we’ll share our findings and explore even more…until the end of the night. At the end you’ll have a test suite with a happy flow and some negative tests and a new tool discovered with new ideas. Everyone presents their suite and their approach.

Refactoring sessions

You’ll have a bad code base of UI/API tests and you’ll have to refactor them while mob programming.

Ref*cktoring sessions

Yes, NOT refactoring but reF*cktoring sessions.
It’s the complete opposite of refactoring. So you have a clean code base and you make it worse and worse BUT it still has to work! This is a super fun event to do especially with UI tests. :wink:

Reverse Engineering

Get an application with some black-box parts in it and reverse engineer the black-box part. (Without looking at the code, so just by giving input in the UI/API)
Split up to 2 teams and see which team does it in the least amount of guesses.

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Wow those are some fantastic suggestions, absolutely love the idea of reF*cktoring sessions they sound like great fun! :rofl:

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Yea they are the best :smiley: because you can’t make it fail but you have to wrote the worst code possible XD

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I had a fun training session last week - I paired with a dev for Test-Driven Development. He handled the coding, while I helped think up automated tests to shape the project. It was a great way for us to each see how the other one thinks and cross-pollinate between our respective disciplines.

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that sounds awesome! Pairing is a fantastic way to learn, love this idea it’s made me start to think of potentially putting on a TDD workshop :slight_smile:

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Some games I mentioned in this Racket

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